The monumental architecture plays a central role in the definition of ideologies. Starting from reflections on the Balkanian modernist utopia, Marko Lulić interrogates himself on the political and cultural contradictions of the monument. Death of the Monument, postmodern epigraph with fire red characters, reveals the ideological force of the monument, aesthetic weapon used to impress the masses of any era. Persuasive and seducing like in the best mass communication marketing tradition, the admonition transforms into an illogical presence of the artwork, which is a monumental negation of itself. The visual impact conveyed through a specialized and unconscious mechanism acquires instinctively a conceptual form, leading us to raise some questions: doesn’t the death of the monument coincide with its birth? Absent of any auto critical apparatus, isn’t the monument able to mislead collective conscience? Do we still have to build monuments?

Keyword: spolia

Installed at the entrance of the Domus Severiana, the artwork by Marko Lulić allows us to open a critical reflection on the monuments of ancient Rome. To the fall of the empire, a sophisticated and irreversible operation of political strategy materially transfigures the past to absorb authority: the phenomenon of thespolia, the reuse of ancient materials, the experience of death and, simultaneously, rebirth. The death ofurbe highlights the birth of the myth of Rome, a circular movement that allows centuries to destroy and rebuild, the spolia are treasures and jewels that can be mounted in a new cultural forma urbis. The first monuments to fall are the pagan temples: the Church of Rome radically changes its relationship with the ancient, the political and propagandistic requirements dictate the abandonment of an initial conservation of the antique in favor of the destruction of the pagan past. The new Christian aesthetic subverts the ancient criteria which conferred preeminence to the volumetric and spatial structure and, on the contrary, it favors major importance to single pieces of spolia. Even though the Church activate this program of spoliation with the dual purpose of acquiring authority of the ancient and eliminating the traces of paganism, the reuse of ancient materials transforms in re-elaboration of artistic heritage, conservation of pagan identity and, in a broader sense, the transmission of a shared cultural memory, marking the beginning of an artistic sensibility that Christianity will nurture without interruption.